Faith’s Works

Paloma Faith tries to win a new audience.

Paloma Faith’s wit and camp have made her a success in England, but will that sensibility translate to American audiences?Credit Photograph by Pari Dukovic

Paloma Faith is a twenty-seven-year-old former drama student, dancer, and magician’s assistant from London who is about to release “Fall to Grace,” her second album and her first to appear in America. She identifies as Cockney, and success has brought her into posh company; her shape-shifting background lends itself to improvisation and poses. But, when your first album is called “Do You Want the Truth or Something Beautiful?,” poses are not to be criticized. For Faith, styles are more fun to play with than to honor, and she has a sharp, multi-textured, hefty voice that allows her to put across pretty much any style she favors, even if she usually favors a brand of neo-soul.

What makes Faith interesting isn’t just her conversational affect or her raw talent—which is considerable enough to have made her an adviser on the current British version of “The Voice” and to have made her first album a platinum-seller—but how her cultural accent will read in America. Her affect has been described as “Cockney madam panto,” which is fairly opaque language: “panto” refers to campy Christmas theatre; you know what madams oversee.

Faith’s entrance into the American market comes after that of two enormously popular English singers—Amy Winehouse and Adele—whom she is likely tired of discussing, and she will have to navigate the odd calculus of the things about Brits that Americans like and the things that give them pause.

What makes the music of Adele and Winehouse appealing is, in part, its lack of camp and other British attributes that can make songs such complex interactions. Winehouse was a pained soul singer who followed an American tradition, and we instinctively knew how to listen to her. We also understand the Olympic march of Adele, who tends toward a kind of vocal blitzkrieg and emotionally triumphant mash notes: deep moments rendered in big lights. Faith, though, wants to use makeup and her gift for cheeky humor to avoid such categories, an approach that didn’t succeed for Robbie Williams—at least not in America.

During many of her shows, Faith announces that she isn’t fond of music made after 1973, a nice line for someone born in 1985. Performing at Joe’s Pub a few months ago, she said that she likes older American pop but that she’s “not that keen on what you’re producing at the moment.” She cites Etta James as her favorite singer and wears elaborate, form-fitting beaded dresses that were designed for social functions held in times that have passed and in buildings that are extinct. While assembling her outfit before the show at Joe’s Pub, she referred to a pile of pinned hair weaves as “challah”; by the time she hit the stage, the loaves were framed by pompoms.

“Picking Up the Pieces,” the first single on her new album, is heartbreak disco at its root, though it gets lost in overproduction. It begins with strings, a steady kick, and Faith’s voice, which is low and supplicating and then, after a few lines, wide open—a move that Whitney Houston perfected. It still works. We need only a straight dance tune here, and yet, before a minute is up, we are lost in thumping drums and epic guitars, as if Faith were preparing to open for Kylie Minogue or Coldplay. There are some lovely backup vocals, but things get all kitchen sink in a hurry. This is odd cover for a singer who needs none. It’s odder still that the song is co-produced by Nellee Hooper, who, with Soul II Soul, Massive Attack, and Björk, made some of the best pop of the late eighties and early nineties, much of it using clean, sharp sounds surrounding great voices, like Faith’s.

Live, Faith and her songs hit perfectly when they’re reduced to piano and samples, and contain no vocals beyond those of Faith and her main backup singer, Baby Sol, who is from Congo. (Faith has excellent taste in vocalists, and is not threatened by being outshone; one of her previous singers was Lianne La Havas, now a solo artist who played a show at the Darby supper club that featured the best upper-range singing I’d heard this year—until Faith’s show.)

Onstage, Faith is a natural, a stylish, quick-witted type who has no trouble kicking off her stilettos and dancing on a piano. She’s just the kind of person who deserves that vaporous category of “personality,” the utility players who appear on “Hollywood Squares” and talk shows with weird regularity. But that’s a few years away—first, the gods demand touring and a hit.

Adele was recently tapped to sing the theme for “Skyfall,” the new James Bond movie, which is now being promoted with an inescapable series of posters and magazine covers and TV spots. The singer most often associated with Bond is Shirley Bassey, responsible for both “Goldfinger” and “Diamonds Are Forever.” Other than Etta James, Bassey is the influence that Faith most often brings up in interviews. But, in America, you don’t get to be both a straight soul-searcher like James and a sequinned shouter like Bassey, whom we love more for her style than for her pain. Which path will Faith follow—truth or beauty?

“Fall to Grace” is a dependably fun album despite its overexertion. The songs are there, amid all the momentous arrangements. But, established as she is at home, in America she needs that one song. And, despite her high levels of camp and innuendo, she could still make it on the strength of a straightforward and plainspoken song, such as “Just Be,” the second single from the new album.

In concert, she has a good routine before she sings the song, a kind of rope-a-dope—feign ditzy, land smart. She talks about her frustration with the utopian nature of most love songs. Then she announces a project to correct that problem by taking “a more realistic approach.” (She sometimes dedicates “Just Be” to those who have “been in a relationship for longer than three months.”) The album production stays close to her live performance, and that’s to the better: a piano, Faith’s voice, and a second voice adding accents in the chorus are all the arrangement that’s needed.

This song is sincere, bordering on corny. But it’s tough to know how to judge directness in songs; emotional wisdom isn’t chopped liver. Whether or not the charts honor the song, it shows how strong Faith is when the patter subsides. “Let’s get old together, let’s be unhappy forever,” she begins. This is a full-throated ballad, familiar to the casual fan of Adele. The chorus goes, in part, “don’t say nothing, just sit next to me, don’t say nothing, just be, just be, just be,” which would sound a bit like an e-card without the rest of it. And the rest, here, is not just the lyrics in the verses but Faith’s personality. The British would say that she takes the piss out of herself. When she goes in for the emotional kill, you trust her and stop worrying, because she hasn’t spent hours handing out homilies.

On a large stage, if Faith performed “Just Be” with the barest accompaniment, she could convince the Anglophobes that joking doesn’t negate the ability to hit high notes and nail the big, teary themes. There’s room for another Brit now, no matter how Americans read the accent. ♦

Sasha Frere-Jones worked at The New Yorker as a staff writer and pop-music critic for ten years, beginning in 2004.